How to Leverage What You Know as a Pharmacist to Start Your Own Consulting Business
On this episode, Blair Thielemier, the creator of the Pharmapreneur Academy and the Elevate Pharmacy Summit, joins Tim Ulbrich to talk about ideas and strategies for how to monetize your clinical expertise, including where to start, how to know if you have a good idea and common barriers that pharmacists often have to face and overcome. Blair and Tim also discuss the upcoming Elevate Pharmacy Summit, where you can learn about building revenue with clinical service contracts so that you can help more patients while generating income along the way.
About Today’s Guest
Blair Thielemier, PharmD, is an MTM and business management consultant pharmacist specializing in pharmacy billing models. She consults on and produces e-learning programs for state and national organizations, pharmacy wholesalers, payers, technology start-ups. She has books and online courses available for individuals looking to leverage their pharmacy knowledge into monetized clinical programs at PharmapreneurAcademy.com She speaks internationally about trends in leveraging pharmacists to improve value-based care.
Blair is passionate about the advancement of the profession of pharmacy and believes the shift to a value-based healthcare model is an opportunity for pharmacy to play a bigger role in the system. She believes this shift will change the face of our profession drastically in the next 20 years and wants to help her colleagues prepare and adapt to those changes.
In 2015, she founded a pharmacy consulting business BT Pharmacy Consulting, LLC and currently helps train and coach other pharmacists looking to start their own consulting businesses through an online e-course and membership site at the PharmapreneurAcademy.com. Part of that business includes presenting at pharmacy conferences and pioneering the use of educational online courses for pharmacists interested in providing enhanced clinical services, such as immunizations, point of care testing, chronic care and transitional care management programs.
In April 2017, she launched the first online pharmacy conference in the industry. The Elevate Pharmacy Virtual Summit featured pharmacists of various backgrounds practicing pharmacy at the peak of the profession. There were over 1,800 pharmacists from across the globe who attended the free event.
In April 2020, the 4th annual Elevate Pharmacy Virtual Summit reached thousands of pharmacists across the globe helping them to identify and act on innovative opportunities. The five-day conference presented by the Pharmapreneur Academy has been leading the way in virtual education and events in the pharmacy industry for the past 4 years.
Blair’s interests include advocating for community pharmacy services that help providers in primary care and post-acute care improve quality measures and patient outcomes. She is dedicated to putting out helpful information about pharmacist billing options and the benefits of pharmacy consulting services.
In her spare time, she enjoys spending time with her husband and children, gardening and raising animals on their small farm and traveling abroad. She also enjoys reading personal development books, listening to business podcasts, studying meditation and human potential and learning about investing and personal finance.
Summary
Pharmacist and entrepreneur, Blair Thielemier, joins Tim Ulbrich on this episode to discuss how to leverage your skills as a pharmacist to start your own consulting business or side hustle. Blair touches on common barriers and hurdles to success in the mindset of the entrepreneur and ways to overcome self-limiting beliefs when it comes to your business. Pharmacists have such an impressive breadth of knowledge that can be applied widely. With some soft skills training, sales education, and business basics, that you just can’t get in pharmacy school, you can develop the mindset of an entrepreneur. This mindset shift means thinking about and actively asking about your clients’ and patients’ needs, anticipating those needs, and providing solutions to meet those needs and provide value. Consultation can be monetized in many ways, personalized to the pharmapreneur’s ideas, and applied through various methods whether consulting in an office, in a pharmacy-based setting, entirely independently or virtually.
Through her personal experiences, Blair discovered that she could use and monetize her own pharmacy skills and knowledge of the body to the cellular level, in countless ways to help others, ultimately leading to the creation of the Pharmapreneur Academy, her consulting business, and the creation of the Elevate Pharmacy Virtual Summit. The Elevate Pharmacy Virtual Summit aims to teach pharmacist entrepreneurs the skills necessary for building successful businesses and consulting programs, including methods for increasing revenue, relationship building, and a system for success.
Mentioned on the Show
- YFP Planning: Financial Planning for Pharmacists
- Register for the Elevate Pharmacy Virtual Summit
- YFP 117: Three Bold Predictions for the Future of Pharmacy
- YFP 089: From Unemployed to Successful Pharmapreneur
- YFP 039: One Pharmacy Entrepreneur’s Journey to Maximizing Income and Paying Off Student Debt
- Pharmapreneur Academy Blog
- Pharmapreneur Academy
Episode Transcript
Tim Ulbrich: Blair, welcome back to the show.
Blair Thielemier: Thank you so much for having me again.
Tim Ulbrich: Excited. This is, for the record, your fourth time on the YFP podcast. So we’re excited to have you back. Last time we had you on was Episode 117, all the way back in September 2019 where we talked about three bold predictions for the future of pharmacy. And I want to put you on the spot here for a moment. So we had talked about predictions you had around automation continuing to happen and evolve in community pharmacy practice, the shift that you thought would be happening to appointment-based models, and the third thing that you talked about was the continued shift in focus on pharmacists being embedded in primary care practices. So since September 2019, we obviously have had all that a pandemic has thrown at us, which I feel like for many pharmacists, we’ve been focusing on vaccine distribution, serving our patients the best that we can. What have you seen in your space, your world, in terms of these predictions and where we’re at in 2021?
Blair Thielemier: Yeah, I mean, those predictions, you know, that we were going to be shifting at least diversifying our revenue streams away from just a product-focused business model to now include services, I also kind of saw this opportunity for pharmacists to step in and have an impact on preventive and community population health. So yeah, the COVID pandemic really was a catalyst, I think, in a good way for clinical services led by pharmacists. And it’s something that I’m going to continue to talk about and beat this dead horse that pharmacists need provider status. But we can also do more and help our patients, even right now when we don’t have provider status. So you know, two of those predictions I’m still not reversing my stance on either one of those. And the third one, for us to start becoming embedded in physicians’ offices, especially when we start looking at quality metrics and some of the pay-for-performance models that CMS is really, really focusing in on, there’s going to be a huge opportunity for clinically-trained pharmacists in the future.
Tim Ulbrich: Absolutely. And we’ve seen — shoutout to my Ohio colleagues here have done an awesome job advocating on our behalf. We’ve seen some exciting evolutions here in Ohio with value-based contracts, embedding pharmacists, obviously the evolution of telehealth that’s happening. We’ve still got some work to do on the reimbursement side of that as well, but I think there’s exciting times ahead. And one of the things I often think about, if you think about telehealth as one example of if we could now move a model where you might have depended on a pharmacist being embedded in a clinic to be able to be accessible from a population health standpoint to serve multiple clinics and perhaps those are the highest risk or could improve those metrics to the greatest degree, wow. I mean, talk about really trying to leverage the pharmacist’s expertise. So 2019, we talked about some of that. It’s been exciting to see the movement and certainly more on the horizon. And today, we’re going to talk about ideas and strategies for how folks can perhaps think about some of their clinical expertise, their experiences, how might they turn some of that into a business or a side hustle? How might they monetize some of that? How might they think like an entrepreneur? Or what are some of the barriers, obstacles, case studies, things that you’ve seen from your experience? And so before we get into that conversation, remind our listeners who may not have caught one of the three previous episodes, a little bit about your background since graduating from pharmacy school, and the work that you’re currently doing with the Pharmapreneur Academy.
Blair Thielemier: Yeah, so after I graduated pharmacy school, long story short, went from being a clinical hospital pharmacist to having no job whatsoever. So you know, it was a rough time. I was six months pregnant with my first child. We now have three. And it was a small, rural hospital, declining reimbursements, just couldn’t afford to keep two full-time pharmacists on staff. And so I was really left out in the cold, kind of being six months pregnant and trying to figure it out. So what I did, fell back on my community pharmacy roots, and I went to a couple local independents and just offered my help. And they were like, ‘Well, we have this new clinical thing called an MTM and none of us know how to do it. We were kind of hoping that you might want to do it for us.’ And I did, I went through the first couple cases and worked with those patients and absolutely fell in love with clinical services and I thought, this is my purpose in life. I mean, I don’t mean to sound dramatic. But that was really the feeling that I had was like, this is my future. I don’t know what it’s going to look like. But this is the path I have to follow. So I really just tried to make myself as knowledgeable as possible on these clinical pharmacy services. And in doing so, I was talking about it on my blog and eventually ended up creating a training course in the Pharmapreneur Academy. And you know, now we work with pharmacists and independent pharmacy owner clients that just like you mentioned at the beginning, you want to work with a collaborative provider doing remote telehealth services for maybe three or four providers in your area and seeing 50-100 patients per provider? That’s a full-time position. You know, that’s creating new jobs for pharmacists and being able to really think outside the box and understand some of the nuances of the quality payment programs and pay-for-performance stuff. It really allows pharmacists to what I call think like an entrepreneur, which is to see these gaps in the marketplace and also see opportunities in the marketplace so that we can leverage those skills in new ways to impact our community’s health and also the health of people across the U.S. because with telehealth, I mean, I don’t see that going away.
Tim Ulbrich: Right.
Blair Thielemier: Anytime soon either.
Tim Ulbrich: And so you’ve made this transition obviously from a clinical pharmacist and the role that you had to now really what I see of educating, training, coaching, motivating various pharmacists, which is really interesting, I think is inspiring when you think about impact. And we’ll talk about the business side of it here in a moment. When you think about impact, when you’re able to help people take an idea and help frame, shape that idea, perhaps help them overcome some of the obstacles or barriers that may seem overwhelming to them in the moment and then think about seeing that service develop and hopefully thrive at some point and the impact that that will have on patients, obviously that’s far greater than the impact that you could have had alone. And I see so much of that happening, what you’re doing at the Pharmapreneur Academy. One question I have for you as you think back to your journey, would you have ended up here today doing what you’re doing if it weren’t for that job loss? And I ask that because I feel like when you talk with folks that I think have that entrepreneurial slant, itch, bug, whatever you want to call it, like it comes out eventually, right? I mean, it’s going to come out. You’re either going to get frustrated with the situation you’re in, see an opportunity, see a problem that can be solved. So as you reflect back on the journey, how critical was that situation, that moment, as difficult as it was to where you are today?
Blair Thielemier: I don’t actually know if I’ve ever told you this story, Tim. After I was working as an MTM consultant, like just kind of doing PRN for these local independents, it was probably my daughter was about 6 months old at the time and there became a director of pharmacy position come open at the local regional hospital one county over. So not the place I had been let go from but one county over. And I went there, and I applied for the job, and I got the job, of course. They offered me the job. And after the interview, they were walking me around the pharmacy, they were introducing me to the team, they were showing me my very own computer and all this stuff, and I actually that day was probably worse than the day that I lost my job the first time because I felt like there were like these two paths laid out ahead of me. And one was like the I know what that career path is going to lead to. I’ve been there, I’ve done that. There was more responsibility as the director but also I had what I thought was a pretty secure position at the other hospital. And you know, I just, I thought, how many more years am I going to do this before I finally go after what I really want, which is to own my own business and have the freedom and flexibility and autonomy to work the way that I want? And so I went home that evening and told my husband, I’m like, ‘Well, I got the job. Bad news is I’m not going to take it.’
Tim Ulbrich: But…
Blair Thielemier: Yeah. I got it, and I’m not going to take it. It was kind of one of those moments where my parents were concerned about me, you just spent a ton of money going to school, getting your pharmacist license, and you’re already like I’m going to try this other thing. But I really, I just at that time, I just felt like there wasn’t another option for me. It was really like, if you don’t try this, Blair, you’re going to regret it for the rest of your life. And that was the big turning point for me is like, you can still work your job while you’re trying to build up your side hustle. But there comes a point too to where you really have to decide, am I going to focus on this? Or am I going to focus on this? And that was the point to like just get that started. I think it was — I was originally pushed off that traditional path by when I lost my job. And then I actually chose the other path whenever I decided not to take the director position. So every day, I’m still choosing to show up at the Academy for my clients and to continue to really help them help their patients. That’s what I want to grow. And that’s the impact that I want to have is helping pharmacists leverage the stuff that they’re really good at that I can just support them with some of the business and marketing skills that we didn’t learn in school.
Tim Ulbrich: Absolutely. And let’s go there and discuss that further as I suspect many folks will be listening and saying, “Hey, I’ve got this really cool area of expertise,” or perhaps I have this idea, and I just don’t know exactly what I could do with it. And you know what, I was trained to be a darn good clinical pharmacist. But I don’t know about marketing, developing business plans, and financing my business. And oh, by the way, this is really scary to think about. Maybe I have a young family or I’ve got a stable income. We talk about it sometimes, the golden handcuffs, right, in terms of being able to — or I have $175,000-200,000 of student loan debt that might be getting in the way of what I’m doing, which obviously connects through the work that we do. So someone that has an idea or even knows that they’ve got something that is worthwhile sharing with others, having an impact in the work that they’re doing, where do they start? You know, I think this is the common thing I hear is, I don’t know where to start. And that fear can often come to be quickly where you can convince yourself that I either have to leave what I’m doing altogether to pursue this or I can’t pursue this because I have limited time and I’m working on this full-time, and sometimes we don’t get past the start line, right, to even see what might be potential going forward. So as you coach folks in the Pharmapreneur Academy, I would assume from all walks of where their idea is at from maybe I don’t have one but I know I want to do something to I’ve got something to I’ve validated it to I’m trying to scale it and everything in between, like what advice would you have for folks that are hearing this and thinking, I just don’t know where to start.
Blair Thielemier: You know, we really have a process. Like it’s a step-by-step framework that we — I encourage people to kind of put their blinders on. So think about what you want, think about the program that you want to build, put your blinders on, work towards that, and then test it. If it doesn’t seem to be something that the market is interested in, it’s OK to pivot too. So I think we get so attached to our ideas, when we have one, you know, usually people are like, “I have zero ideas of what I can do as an entrepreneur,” or “I have 50 ideas about what I can do as an entrepreneur.” So both of them I really tell them the same thing, like baby step No. 1: Look at your career and look at your past experience, look at your network, because what you have to offer is very individual. Your past experiences, maybe you know, you’re like me and my undergrad degree, I was studying plant biology because I’ve always been a little bit of a crunchy plant nerd. And I was like, maybe when I go to pharmacy school, I want to go to the Amazon and research novel drug development. And now, like I’m finally kind of seeing this come full circle as I’m getting my Master’s in Ayurvedic medicine. I almost forgot that about myself. Like I forgot that I was really into plants and herbal and like even growing a garden and nutrition. I had kind of forgot that about myself. So we’ve got some places where people can revisit some exercises that they can do to figure out if they don’t have an idea what their idea could be, if they have too many ideas how to scale down and start with just one thing. So that’s what we call our three pharmapreneurial paths, which is essentially are you going to be a consultant in a physician’s office? Are you going to be a consultant in a pharmacy-based setting? Or are you going to try to do kind of completely separate, on-your-own, like a virtual cash-based kind of business? So being able to really hone in, figure out which of those paths I want to take really makes figuring out your offer, so we talk about deciding on your offer, we’re going to talk more on this year’s Elevate Summit about how to scale your business from $1,000-5,000 per month in revenue to upwards of $25,000 per month in revenue using these techniques and things that I have learned throughout the past seven years in the online business industry and figuring out how to apply those things to pharmacy. And the other thing I really work with people a lot on when I coach them is helping them to identify their limiting beliefs. So you know, I know, Tim, you’re a big self-development person. And this idea of the growth mindset versus the fixed mindset, one of the things that I really see people in this static or fixed mindset deal with is imposter syndrome. And they, they might say, “Oh, well I’m not a clinical guru,” or, “I’m just a retail pharmacist.” I hate hearing that. I’m like, you’re not just a retail pharmacist —
Tim Ulbrich: With just a doctorate degree, yeah.
Blair Thielemier: You just have, you know, this amazing breadth of knowledge underneath your belt. You’re trained unlike any other healthcare professional on Earth. I mean, ask a doctor some questions about pharmacokinetics and see what happens. Like your training is so unique. Our knowledge of biochemistry and physiology, down to the cellular level, is what I think really makes for an interesting recipe for a pharmacist to be able to take influence from all these different seemingly unconnected areas of health and even looking into stuff like Ayurvedic medicine and meditation, how that has an impact on our mental health, on chronic stress, on our gut health, like all of these things really play together with the pharmacological interventions, the modern medicine can bless us with.
Tim Ulbrich: And so you mentioned one, Blair, which I would agree with, you know, some of the self-limiting beliefs, imposter syndrome, being a hurdle that folks may have to overcome and doubting whether or not they can do something, perhaps making the mistake of looking at others and you know, making assumptions that may not be true about what others are doing or looking at others and saying, “I’m not sure I can do that,” when in fact those folks may have been doing that for 5, 6, 7 years and they obviously had a place they started, which takes me to the question, like what are other hurdles that you see folks having to overcome? Common barriers of folks that are coming to you in the Academy that are just trying to get started, whether they don’t yet have an idea or they do have an idea, common hurdles that folks need to overcome or work through as they develop this business idea further.
Blair Thielemier: Yeah, so a lot of people come to me and say, “Hey, how do I get a job as an MTM consultant?” I’m like, “Well, it’s not really a position you can apply for, unfortunately, at this time, anyway.” And what I think that maybe we aren’t taught in school is how to talk with someone, how to have like a sales conversation or a collaborative business arrangement with someone. So really, like I kind of teach them — I feel like I’m teaching them the language of business to where they can feel comfortable going out and not feeling like, oh, I’m just going to hand somebody my business card and wait for a call because I don’t want to be pushy or sales-y or whatever. So what I teach them really has to do with building up your selling skills, building up confidence in what you’re talking about. The having conversations with people that don’t feel sleazy or sales-y, we have the four A’s of selling, which what I call first, you start with Asking what challenges they’re dealing with. What have they tried in the past? If you’re talking to a physician maybe like what quality metrics are you reporting on? Or what are some of your biggest medication issues with patients? So asking that question is the first A. The second would be Assessing. What are some things that I’ve heard? I’ve heard Blair talk about chronic care management, I’ve heard other pharmacists talk about pharmacogenomic testing or whatever. So assessing what type of program could I put together that can be customized to this person that can really help them? Because it’s not necessarily what I want to do. Like maybe I went in there thinking, oh, I really, I kind of want to do annual wellness visits for this place, but come to find they’ve already got somebody doing annual wellness visits and they’re happy with that service. But they don’t have somebody doing chronic care management. So you know, you go in with this like kind of a loose plan but then leave it open for —
Tim Ulbrich: That’s right.
Blair Thielemier: Leave it open for changes and pivots. And so being able to assess what their needs are and agreeing on this could be a good thing, would you want me in the office? Or would you want me in my own office? And would you want to do a collaborative practice agreement? Or should we just work under a collaborative business arrangement? And finally, the final piece of that is Accepting, accepting of the program, accepting of you as an employee, signing off on that legal agreement, and really just kind of going through the pilot and implementation phase of any type of new business relationship is going to go through that kind of four-step process. So when people go in and say, “Well, I talked to my physician’s office about it and I handed them a flier and told them that I was available for hire, but I never heard back from them,” I’m like, “Yeah, that’s not really the way I would have tried to get my foot in the door. And here’s what I would recommend to you to do. Go back and have that conversation with them because they may not even understand who you are or why you’re trying to help them or what it is you do. So first things first, just build a relationship and talk to them like they are a person and that you are a person, and you just are looking to see if there’s any opportunities to work together.”
Tim Ulbrich: In that last example you gave is such a good one because I think sales and accepting some of the success and challenge that can come from that is something probably many pharmacists struggle with. And this is an area where I see the community and the network being so valuable inside of the Academy because I know firsthand, this is an area where one of the coaches that I’ve worked with before calls this “head trash.” Right? There’s things that, you know, are barriers that we come to believe are going to happen or the example you gave of I dropped off a flier, I let them know I’m available, reach out to me if you want to, that is not sales. Right? That is a “I want to feel comfortable walking out of this scenario without putting risk for it that I might get a no.” And I think in that example, I would encourage folks to reflect on like, why is that the approach? Because at the end of the day, remember, we’re talking about if you have a business idea, you have a problem that needs to be solved. And if you believe so wholeheartedly in that vision, then the outcome needs to be — if I have a solution to a problem, then I need to make sure we get to that solution because I know I’m going to better serve that physician, better serve the patients that that physician also cares for, and so my primary goal in sales is to be able to further that mission. And in that mindset, which gets back to some of the growth mindset, is a totally different perspective when somebody is thinking about a sales process. But if you’re trying to go about this on an island — and I think this is where an academy and a group can be so helpful, you know, you can talk these things out loud, talk to folks that have different levels of experience, and start to learn through one another and also reflect on those conversations and get some feedback as well. One thing you mentioned, Blair, earlier was think like an entrepreneur. And I know many pharmacists that I’ve talked with, you know, when they may think, hey, I’m a really good clinician, but I don’t consider myself an entrepreneur. And that can feel overwhelming. I think sometimes we glorify the image on an entrepreneur, tech startup, big offerings of companies and so forth, and we often don’t think of what may be realistic in terms of the work that we’re doing. What do you mean by that concept of thinking like an entrepreneur? Break that down a little bit further.
Blair Thielemier: Yeah, so I really think that pharmacy’s origins started with people like my great-grandfather, who owned his own pharmacy in the Chicagoland area in the early ‘40s. And it was that kind of person-to-person service, it was the idea that like if I don’t make an offer to help this person, they may not be able to get the solution to their problems. They may not even know that this option exists for them. So even giving like just a very simple answer, so one of my friends, she was doing like a intermittent fasting, keto-type diet, and so she was mentioning having some issues with muscle aches. And I was like, “Oh, well make sure that you’re drinking a ton of water if you’re going to do one of those diets because you’re losing water. You’re also losing a lot of electrolytes, so you need a really high-quality vitamin supplement.” And you know, she was like, “Oh, I never even considered that if I was going to change my diet that I needed to think about supplementation.” And she was like, “Oh, but I can’t take those big horse pill vitamins.” And I’m like, “Well, they make gummy vitamins. And they make liquid,” like there’s so many options that you can do. But because she had never really thought to ask me about it, I never even thought to talk about the different ways that you could — we haven’t even gotten to compounded medications to where you could really help someone if they do have those types of issues. So even thinking about just basic pharmacy services from an entrepreneurial standpoint, you’re thinking about, OK, well what time of the year is it? What are people needing? What are my patients experiencing right now? It’s hayfever season. We’re going into spring and thinking through like, what are these people’s needs right now? And right now, they’re needing some COVID vaccines, for one. They’re probably also needing some Claritin. So being able to think like that and see the opportunities in the market, the gaps in the market, to have conversations and talk to people about their pain points. You know, Elon Musk didn’t wait for people to come say, “Hey, I really need an electric car.” He was like, this is what the country needs, like even if consumers aren’t screaming that they want an electric car, I’m going to create something because I see this opportunity, and I see it as impacting the highest good. So we’re going to make it, and we’re going to make sure it fits people’s needs and their pain point and also let them feel good about the investment that they’re making in their next vehicle. So same thing, you know, I think when we talk about investing in people’s health, so many pharmacists are like, “Oh, I would feel bad if I charged my patients for a consult on their nutritional supplements or a functional medicine consult or whatever.” I’m like, “Yeah, but people need to have some type of investment in the program or else they’re not going to take your advice.”
Tim Ulbrich: Yep. And value it —
Blair Thielemier: And value it.
Tim Ulbrich: — as such, right? I mean, I think that’s partly why we’re having some of the challenges that we have in the profession that we’ve largely given away what we have for free. Obviously that’s an overgeneralization in some regards. But I think the comfort may not be there of back to where we started the conversation, you know, any good business idea is a problem that warrants a solution, is one that you’re passionate about, and is one that people are willing to pay for. And if you can find that idea of what you’re providing value and providing a solution to a problem and you can obviously generate revenue from it, if that’s deriving value to an individual, it’s OK for them to pay for that, right? And it’s OK for that to be profitable because there’s a willing investment that’s being made as they see the return on the investment. And if we think about how we invest as a consumer, you know, I think that helps reshape our mind of, I invest in a lot of things that may not be a physical product, per se, but I believe has a lot of value and I’m willing to invest both time and money to invest in that solution that is going to provide some of that value. And I think this is a good transition, Blair, to an upcoming summit that you are hosting again, the Elevate Pharmacy Summit, which I’m excited about, April 9 and 10, and as folks are hearing this, thinking about OK, strategies that I might consider to monetize clinical expertise or I’ve got an idea and I want to think about how I might begin to flesh that idea out further or maybe I’ve started something, and you talked about kind of that growth phase from let’s say $1,000 in revenue per month to $5,000, whatever that growth would look like. And I know that some of what you’re going to be discussing on the summit. So tell us about the Elevate Pharmacy Virtual Summit, who it’s for, what folks can expect, and the theme of what you’re trying to accomplish in the summit this year, April 9 and 10.
Blair Thielemier: Yeah, so this year’s summit, we’ll be teaching our entire system over the course of two days. So it’s two days of live trainings, of live presentations that will help you really decide on the services and programs you want to offer. So like you just said, thinking about the solution that you could offer someone, how to put a value on that. So one example is a client that I’ve worked with. She had some issues with fertility and changed up her diet and nutritional supplement regimen and kind of fixed some of those issues with her microbiome and gut health and was able to conceive. And she, because of that experience she had, she really felt called to create a group program for other females that were of childbearing age who were looking to conceive. And you know, she was asking me about pricing and I’m like, “Well, if you help someone who couldn’t have a baby have a baby, what type of return on investment, you know, like what –”
Tim Ulbrich: Absolutely.
Blair Thielemier: Can you imagine how much more enriching that person’s life would be? And there is value in what we can offer. And there is value in our solutions. So you know, she was able to really think about the impact that she wanted to have. And so I really have worked with hundreds of pharmacists to overcome some of these issues from absolutely no idea of what they want to do to OK, now I’m generating $5,000 in revenue each month, you know, I’m thinking about leaving my full-time position, I’m thinking about hiring someone else to help me, you know, scaling to that $25,000 to $50,000 to $100,000 per month in revenue and how that works for someone using some of the processes that I’ve built in to my own business. So some of the automation and some of the marketing and lead gen and social media strategies. That’s exactly why we created the Elevate Pharmacy live this year is so that we can teach those. It’s going to be also a very small-knit group. So there’s only 300 tickets available in our Zoom room so that we can take Q&A, so we’re actually working with them. It’s really a two-day workshop that we’re going to be teaching and talking about and then of course, Tim, you’re going to come on and talk about like kind of your book publishing empire and how you’ve been able to impact so many pharmacists and helping them improve their financial health and then also what to do with it when you do get to that, you know, $25,000, $50,000 to $100,000 in revenue per month. Like that’s a fun conversation to have with the Tims is like, what do I do with all this money? That’s a great place to be. And you can really start thinking about how to have the impact you want and how to structure your services so that you can — if you do choose to leave your job, you can have this as a full-time position and it’s something you can grow and really build out. So that’s pretty much what we’ll be teaching on those two days. It’s our system from taking you to low five-figure revenue to six- and seven-figure revenue as a pharmacist.
Tim Ulbrich: I’m really excited for the event, not only participating as a speaker, as you mentioned, but also that this is available to pharmacists. When you and I talked a couple weeks ago, I was going through the list as you’re talking about marketing, lead gen, social strategy, building processes, I was like, yep, fumbled through that, fumbled through that, fumbled through that.
Blair Thielemier: Me too, Tim.
Tim Ulbrich: And every one of those was an incredible learning experience but, you know, to have other examples and I certainly read lots of books and resources and blogs and podcasts and all those things, which were incredibly helpful to see things outside of the industry as well. But to hear from folks that I can connect with and to begin to develop a community that I can connect with, I certainly know the value of that. So looking forward to the Elevate Pharmacy Virtual Summit, April 9 and 10 coming up. You can learn more about the summit and register and join me at PharmapreneurAcademy.com/YFP. Again, that’s PharmapreneurAcademy.com/YFP. Blair, thank you so much for joining. Appreciate the time, as always. Appreciate the work that you’re doing to better the profession as well as those that have some of these ideas and entrepreneurial dreams. And excited about what this means for them individually but also for the patients that they serve. So thank you very much.
Blair Thielemier: Absolutely. And thank you for having me, and thank you for the work that you’re doing as well, helping pharmacists create this firm financial foundation so that they can really build something amazing on top of it.
Tim Ulbrich: Absolutely. Thank you, Blair.
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